


Lightning Never Strikes Twice

by TwinTerrors



Series: Sometimes, You Just Need to Flip Things Around [4]
Category: DCU (Comics), The Flash (Comics), The Flash - All Media Types
Genre: Hospitals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-23
Updated: 2018-12-23
Packaged: 2019-09-25 16:52:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17125124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TwinTerrors/pseuds/TwinTerrors
Summary: This wasn’t supposed to happen, Barry thinks despairingly, eyes locked on the still form of his nephew. Not again.They say lightning never strikes twice in the same place. Apparently, this does not apply to Barry Allen or his nephew, Bart.





	1. Prologue-Repeat

The steady beeping of the heart monitor was all that was keeping Barry sane. And even calling him sane was generous, after several hours of silence from the doctors after he had been allowed into the room.

He had been entrusted with this boy, his own nephew, and this is the first thing that happens. He knows it wasn’t actually his fault, that he couldn’t have known, that there was nothing he could have done, but it still felt like he was responsible for this.

Bart Allen, only thirteen years old, lying so so still in the hospital bed. The nephew Barry had only known he had for less than a week. And now, he was in the unconscious in the ICU, covered in chemical burns. The doctors were worried about his heart, the strain of that much electricity running through his small body.

_This wasn’t supposed to happen_ , Barry thought, over and over. _This can’t have happened. Not again. Once was weird enough. But now Bart too? This wasn’t supposed to happen again._


	2. Once is Happenstance

Barry woke up suddenly when he felt the sun on his face. He must have slept through his alarm, he was going to be late to work, he was-in a hospital bed?

He blinked hard. He was wearing a hospital gown, and hooked up to several different machines that seemed to be having trouble taking his vitals. If he had to guess, he would say that the constant obnoxious beeping might have been what woke him up, actually.

A group of nurses rush in with what he assumes is a crash cart. He has to very quickly assure them that he is feeling just fine, and he just needs to get to work. He can’t lose his job.

Once they leave to go get a doctor, he stands up and starts removing all the sensors and looks around for clothes. He wonders what had happened that resulted in him ending up in the hospital like this. Before he can recall, though, the doctor walks in, and is shocked and appalled to see him standing up. Because apparently, he’s been in a coma for over a week.

What.

He had been in a coma. For a  _ week _ ?!

He was so fired.

Eventually, he managed to convince the doctor that he was fine, and with a promise to come back in a week for a checkup that he didn’t intend to keep and some instructions about how to change his bandages (when the nurses changed them, he saw what looked like chemical burns, and maybe some electrical burns, on his back), he was released from the hospital with what was left of his clothes in a paper bag and a cheap pair of sweats. Only after he was catching the bus did he realize that he had never found out what had happened to put him in the coma in the first place.

Figuring he would find out later, if he didn’t remember himself, he mentally prepared himself to arrive at his destination: the central precinct. He needed to convince Captain Singh not to fire him. Hopefully, being in a coma for a week would be enough of an excuse for his absense.

However, when he walked through the door, he was immediately greeted by surprised shouts from Morris. Apparently, everyone had been really worried about him after his accident. This was good news: people at work knew what had happened, so hopefully he wouldn’t have to explain it to Singh.

SIngh, of course, knew all about what had happened. Not only was Barry not fired, he was encouraged to take an entire week off work to recover from-get this-getting struck by lightning! He still couldn’t remember anything like that happening, but that made some sense, maybe, he guessed.

Anyway, Singh and his coworkers helped him pick up his stuff and even got him a cab home. They seemed pretty concerned about him, which was odd. He felt fine!

As soon as he got home (luckily the hospital had had his keys), he dropped all his stuff on the kitchen table, ate an entire can of cashews, and drank seven cups of water. Then, he took off the weird sweats and collapsed on the bed.

 

Barry woke to the warmth of sunlight on his skin.  _ That’s weird _ , he though, frowning. I’m usually awake before the sun-

“Oh god I’m going to be late for work!” he yelped, eyes flying open as he leaped out of bed. Or tried to leap out of bed, at least, as he immediately crashed face-first into the wall.

“Ouch,” he grumbled, rubbing his nose. Then he noticed that he was naked.

“What the hell.”

Then he remembered: both everything he had done the previous day, and what had landed him in the hospital in the first place.

“What. The. Hell.”

He had been in his lab, something had jammed the skylight open, and then he remembered jerking backward into a shelf, but then nothing but strange light until he woke up in the hospital. He groaned, thinking back on his erratic behavior, the way everything had felt hazy and distant. No wonder everyone had been so concerned about him.

_ Maybe I should go to that follow-up after all _ , he thought.

He carefully picked his way across the mess on his floor to get some clothes out of his dresser. Once he was no longer naked, he wandered back out into the main area of his apartment. Before he could decide what needed to be taken care of first, his stomach reminded him that it had probably been a while since he had eaten anything aside from those cashews and the jello the hospital had fed him.

A perusal of his fridge, however, really drove home the fact that he had been gone for a whole week: pretty much everything had gone bad.

“Damn,” he groaned, after sniffing the milk. He poured it down the drain and started working on throwing all the spoiled food into the garbage. Once he was finished with the fridge, he moved on to the cupboards.

After throwing out a moldy loaf of bread and some very brown bananas, he finally found a box of granola bars that were still in-date. He pulled one out and started munching on it while he started figuring out what he needed to do.

_ Well _ , he thought, finishing the bar and pulling out another absently,  _ first I need to take out the trash before everything starts smelling too bad, then make a run to the grocery store. I’ll need to make a list, based on what was expired...wait, when did I last go to the grocery store? Maybe I’ll need to make a full run. Do I have enough in my checking account for that? _

He thought about it, then decided that he probably had enough as long as he was careful with how much he bought. So he dug his phone out of the paper bag the hospital had given him to start his list, only to realize that it hadn’t been charged for over a week and was thus very, very dead.

He groaned, scrounging around the room for his charger.

_ Well, that puts that plan on hold for a while _ , he thought glumly as he watched his phone boot up.

He munched on a third bar as he added the shredded remains of his work clothes to the trash bag.  _ Might need a new shirt too. Can take care of that tomorrow though. _

He turned to check over his closet, but before he took a step his stomach lurched as he felt his elbow catch on the lamp. He whirled around, desperate to catch it in time before it shattered (again), only to find-

“What. The. Hell,” he whispered.

The lamp was tilted at about a 60° from the floor. And it seemed to still be falling... but in slow motion?

Hesitantly, he reached out to grab onto it.   
“Ouch,” he grumbled as it shocked him. He pushed it back upright, steadying it.

He stared at the lamp. It didn’t move, in slow-motion or otherwise.

“Weird,” he muttered, before moving to continue to the closet.

_ Actually _ , he thought to himself, turning back around toward the kitchen,  _ maybe I should eat one more granola bar first. _

 

“This is getting ridiculous,” he groaned, looking at the stack of empty boxes and bags sitting on his kitchen counter. “How can I be eating this much?!”

It had been three days since he had gotten home from the hospital, and he had had to make a grocery run every morning. He couldn’t keep doing this, he needed to figure out what had happened to his appetite and fix it before he bankrupted himself.

“Wait a second,” he realized. “This started at the morning after I got home from the hospital, didn’t it? Maybe it’s a side effect of some sort, either from the accident or from the coma... I need to write this down.”

He was going to have to call the hospital, and he needed a clear list of symptoms, how much he’d been eating and how fast, figure out what else might be-

_ The static! _ he remembered, jotting that down. Ever since that morning, he had been getting shocked whenever he touched metal, and had shocked the cashier at the grocery store each morning too.

While thinking about what had changed since he had gotten home from the hospital, he suddenly remembered: he hadn’t changed his bandages once!

“Oh god, why am I like this,” he groaned, dashing to the bathroom.

He quickly peeled the tape holding the cotton pad to his back, but then froze.

“Okay, this is definitely going on the list,” he told the reflection of his pale, unmarked back. Even the red marks from where he pulled off the tape had already disappeared.

He added the strange moments when time would seem to almost stop (would that be hallucination? Or delusion?), then stopped to think about it.

_ It  _ can’t _ be _ , he thought, looking down at his hands.  _ Now way did I get superpowers by being struck by lightning. _

However, he still found himself standing up to find a stopwatch before he remembered to just use his phone.

_ I’m a scientist _ , he reasoned, opening the timer app. It would be lazy of me not to test this theory before calling it in.

He took a deep breath, starting the timer. It progressed at a normal speed. He focused on the sensation he felt whenever he had one of his episodes, where everything seems to slow down and he can focus on what’s important and let everything else fall away into the background.

_ Holy shit _ , he thought. Before his eyes, the frantic whirl of the numbers on the screen started to slow, almost to a stop.  _ Getting struck by lightning gave me superpowers. _

He ripped out the list of symptoms and started a new page: he had experiments to plan.

 

There was a commotion outside of the lab, but Barry paid it no mind; he was a CSI tech, not an officer. Unless someone came through his doors, he wasn’t involved.

He’d been back at work for three weeks now. He had used the rest of the week off after he woke up to experiment with and learn to control his powers. His top speed kept improving as he trained more (sue him, he had been a sedentary lab tech before this, who needs to run when you can do science?), and he learned that he needed less flammable clothing. And shoes. And carpets. Oops. It was a good thing he also healed quickly, otherwise he would have had some difficult explanations to make. So he had tried applying his speed to other tasks.

Reading books at superspeed worked fine, as long as he was careful not to let the pages of the book catch fire. However, his phone and laptop just weren’t built to operate at his speeds, keeping him reading at only slightly-better than human speed. Unfortunately, he also learned that speed-reading didn’t do much for his reading comprehension; the knowledge would only stick around for a couple of minutes after he read it, then fade into a frustrating confusion of jumbled words and thoughts.

However, he was able to perform dilutions and prepare solutions at high speeds, making sample preparation for analysis a breeze, and he could even mimic the effects of a centrifuge without needing to worry about balancing the instrument.

Of course, these newfound abilities were not quite as useful as they could be. After all, he had decided that he couldn’t let anyone else find out about the lightning’s effects, so he couldn’t use them in front of his coworkers. But he had been working late a couple of days a week to help clear out the backlog from his sick leave, and once everyone left the lab his progress sped up drastically.

He still needed to figure something out for the clothing fires, though. He had a prototype, but it wasn’t exactly something he could wear to the office without raising some serious eyebrows.

“Allen!” Barry jolted back to the present, nearly dropping the tablet he was using. “Did you hear me?”

“Sorry sir,” he looked apologetically up at Singh, who sighed in annoyance at having to repeat himself.

“There’s some guy with a gun at Central Savings and Loan.”

“Umm,” Barry blinked, failing to see the relevance. “O-Okay?”

“But the gun doesn’t shoot bullets.”

“...What.”

“Exactly,” Singh said, pulling his tablet out from under his arm and showing Barry some security footage from the bank. “He has the building locked down, blocking all the entrances and exits with what seem to be walls of ice. Thought you might want to see, since it seemed right up your alley.”

Barry watched as the man, whose face was hidden beneath what looked like a blue parka and goggles, pulled a gun from under his coat and immediately coated the doors with some sort of crystalline solid.

“Yowzah,” he winced as he watched the man turn and shoot a security guard with the weapon, encasing him completely within seconds.

“Pretty odd huh?” SIngh said, pulling his tablet back. “Anyway, once they catch him, they’ll probably bring the gun up here for study, thought you might want the heads up.”

“Yeah,” Barry said absently, unable to get the image of the man coated in ice out of his head. “Thanks Singh.”

Barry continues to work for another sixty seconds before he breaks, running toward the bathroom with the bag he had hidden his low-friction, fire-resistant prototype in. He couldn’t get the security guard’s face out of his mind, not when there might be something he could do about it.

Within seconds of reaching the bathroom, he was off, already wrapped in the slightly-too-tight suit of red polymer. Luckily, he had also included the old swim cap and goggles he had been using to practice with his powers for the last couple of weeks. This way, there was almost no risk of him being recognized, especially if he didn’t slow down enough for anyone to get a good look at him.

Once he arrived outside the bank, he encountered his first problem: the doors were still stuck closed. However, he had had some time to think about it on the way there, and he had a plan.

He ran full tilt at the frozen glass doors and smashed his way through.

_ Ow _ .

It had worked though, and now Barry was lying on the ground inside the bank, looking up at the man with the ice gun.

He yelped and scrambled to his feet to start running again before the man could react and shoot him, only just making it in time even with his speed. Unfortunately, the lobby of the bank was only about 40 feet deep, so he found himself having to essentially run in circles around the man with the gun to keep moving.

_ Okay, so far so good _ , Barry thought.  _ Now to actually do something about the man with the freeze ray. _

Of course, he hadn’t managed to come up with a plan for that part on his way over, so he was just going to have to wing it.

After a couple of more laps around the lobby to work up his nerves, he changed course, heading straight for the man in the middle. He snatched the gun out of his hands on his way past and carefully left it on the counter for deposit slips near the entrance, far from any of the tellers crouched behind their counters.

_ A few more laps to confuse the man again _ , Barry thought, picking up speed again. Then he body checked him into the wall. _ Bam. That wasn’t too hard. _

He straightened up to see the police finally starting to move toward the doors.

_ Aaand that’s my cue to leave. _

“You.”

The call made him hesitate and turn back around.

“I won’t forget this,” the man in the parka growled, still slumped against the wall. 

“Yeah, okay pal,” Barry muttered as he disappeared. He kinda hoped he hadn’t heard that, but whatever, it wasn’t not like he was ever going to see him again.

When he sauntered back into the lab after another quick change, all the televisions were tuned into the local news channel, where a young woman with curly hair was describing the incident from outside the bank.

“-has not been identified,” she was saying, “but authorities have just released the identity of the attempted robber, Mr. Leonard Snart, age 25.” A picture of the man in the parka (not wearing the parka) appeared in the top right corner of the screen. “Mr. Snart has a record of arrests for theft and breaking and entering dating back six years. He will remain in police custody until bail can be set at a hearing tomorrow.”

“Allen!” Patty waved him over. “You just missed it! There was some new superhero on television!”

“What?” Barry managed not to choke. A superhero?

“Yeah!” she smiled. “They didn’t get any good footage, they were moving so fast, but witness accounts say someone with wearing a red suit with superspeed broke up that robbery down at Central Savings!”

“Wow,” he said. He couldn’t think of anything else to say. They thought he was a superhero?

“They think it might be the Flash!”

“The Flash?!” Barry’s eyes widened. No one had seen Keystone’s hero in years. He had stopped really appearing after the Justice Society had broken up, but he had occasionally shown up to help with fires and other disasters with no apparent pattern.

_ Huh, _ he thought.  _ I guess I do kinda have the same powers as the Flash. I could be the Flash. That way, no one would suspect me! _

As everyone drifted off back to their workstations as it became clear there wasn’t going to be any new information on the TV, Barry continued to think it over.

_ This is what I want to do with these powers, _ he realized.  _ I want to use them to help people, like the Flash did. _

_ I’ll need a lot more practice, though. And to improve my suit. Maybe add some lightning bolts… _

“Allen! Quit daydreaming, I need the results on the Mannheim blood analysis yesterday!”

“You got it boss!” he called back to Singh, shaking himself. He would work that out later, now that he had the idea. But he knew what to do now.

He was going to become the Flash.


	3. Interlude-Comatose

“Mr. Allen?”

Barry abruptly stopped his pacing to whip around to the doctor standing in the doorway.

“Is Bart going to be okay?”

“Mr. Allen, you are the patient’s...uncle?”

“Yes,” he affirmed.

“Where are his parents?”

“They’re not around; it’s just us, and his grandmother.”

“Okay then,” the doctor pulled a tablet out of his coat pocket. “Bartholomew Allen, age 13, 59 inches tall, 95 pounds. Struck by lightning.”

“Is he going to be okay?” Barry asked again.

“Well, he seems to have mostly avoided chemical burns, despite his location at the time of the accident,” the doctor continued to read of his tablet. “He seems to be healing well, even. But we are concerned that he hasn’t woken up yet. It’s possible there might be some brain damage from the electricity, but we won’t be able to tell for sure until he wakes up.”

“And when do you expect that to be?” Barry, having calmed a bit at the first part of his prognosis, was starting to get desperate again.

“Well, like I said, Mr. Allen,” the doctor looked up at last. “It’s concerning that he hasn’t woken up already. We don’t know when, or even if, he will wake up.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Allen.”

As the doctor left the room again, Barry finally sat down in the chair beside the bed. Bart’s hand was resting on top of the blanket that had been pulled over him. Barry reached out and wrapped his own around it.

_ How was he going to explain this to Bart’s grandma? _

_ Oh no. She had no idea what had happened yet! _

He dropped his head into his free hand.

Then he pulled out his phone. He had to make a call.


	4. Twice is Coincidence

An unfamiliar number was calling his cell phone. Barry frowned, but decided to answer it. He had given him number of a couple of neighbors, and to a couple of kids he had met on cases at work, and didn’t want to risk letting the call go to voicemail.

“Hello?”

“Hi, is this Bartholomew Allen?” an older woman’s voice asked.

“Yes?”

“This is Helen Claiborne,” Barry frowned; he didn’t think he knew anyone by that name. “I’m your brother’s mother-in-law.”

“Oh!” he made the connection. He had met the woman once before, at Malcolm’s wedding. It had been a very awkward affair, as the two of them never really spoke after being sent to separate foster homes as children. “Yes, I remember you.” He paused. “Did something happen to Malcolm?”

“What, him? No, how would I know?” Before Barry could figure out how to respond to that, she continued. “It’s about Bart.”

“Bart?”

“Your nephew? My grandson?”

“...Excuse me?”

There was a pause. Then, “Do you mean to tell me that your brother didn’t tell you he had a son?”

“Um,” Barry was still very shocked. “Apparently? I mean, we don’t really talk, like, ever. Come to think of it, I don’t even think I’ve seen him since the wedding, and that was, what, over a decade ago now?”

“That-” she was really annoyed about that. “You know what? I definitely don’t blame you, but it’s not important right now. Anyway, I need to speak with you in person, can you come meet me? I’d come to you, but I’m in the hospital.”

“What?”

“Just get over here, I’ll text you the room number as soon as someone tells me.” Helen hung up.

Barry stared at his phone in shock. That had been a wild conversation from start to finish. He had a nephew!

One who might be dying as he sat and thought. So he scrambled to his feet and went to find Singh to tell him he was taking his lunch break early.

 

When Barry found the right room, he was simultaneously relieved and more confused (then a little guilty about the relief) to find that Helen was in the hospital bed. At first glance, she just seemed annoyed, but on a second glance she seemed more pained than anything else.

“Oh good, you finally made it,” she greeted him. “I need you to watch Bart for the week, it’s his spring break and I’m not allowed to get out of this bed.”

“...I’m sorry?”

“Dad?”

Barry spun around at the small voice, only then noticing the room’s other occupant: a smallish boy with floppy auburn hair sitting in a plastic chair in the corner. He seemed to have been playing a game on his phone, but had turned his attention toward Barry at Helen’s declaration.

“Bart, this is Barry, your father’s twin brother,” Helen explained to the boy-Bart. His nephew. Huh. He could kinda see the family resemblance, in the eyes and nose.

“Um, hi Bart,” Barry said awkwardly extending his hand.

“Hi?” Bart said, eyeing the hand uncertainly.

“Be polite to your uncle, Bart,” Helen scolded gently.

“It’s nice to meet you,” Barry said.

“Yeah?” Bart replied, his response uplifted into a question.

“Anyway, I have his meds in my purse, he needs to take them twice a day, one pill when he gets up and one before bed,” Helen continued, pointing to her purse. “I can repay you for food, but he’s a teenager so he will be needing a lot of it.”

“Um,” both Barry and Bart said at the same time, wearing almost identical unnerved faces. They glanced at each other, and Barry was very reassured that Bart was just as confused by all this as he was.

“Ma’am, I’m not sure why you think this is a good idea,” Barry started.

“Because you’re his uncle, and you seemed like a good sort at the wedding, very responsible,” Helen interrupted. “You work for the police, correct?”

“In forensics, yes,” Barry supplied automatically, failing to see what this had to do with how he became the prime candidate to take care of a 13 year-old.

“And you lived nearby, and I found your number listed on your Facebook page,” Helen continued.

“Wait, how did you find my Facebook page?”

“So, get out of here, make sure to get him to bed at 9 and wake him up by 7.”

“Grandma, how many painkillers did they give you?”

“Out!”

Barry turned to Bart, who looked back at Barry, still mirroring his stunned face. They both mentally shrugged and adjourned to the hallway. Once the door closed behind them, Barry faced Bart again, sighing deeply and rubbing the back of his neck.

“Well, kiddo,” he sighed again. “You got everything you need?”

Bart nodded.

Barry glanced at his watch. “I need to get back to work, so I guess you’re coming with me. I’ll see about finding someone to stay at my apartment with you while I’m at work for tomorrow, but it’s not happening today.”

“Yeah, okay I guess,” Bart muttered, adjusting the strap on the hefty backpack that apparently contained everything he would need for the week.

He followed Barry down to his car in silence, only speaking up after he started the car to ask if he could turn on the radio. The only sound during the ride was Bart flipping endlessly through the channels, never staying on one for longer than a minute. It was driving Barry insane. He was glad the roads and skies were both clear, because otherwise he was sure he would have caused a wreck with how little he was paying attention to driving.

What felt like hours later, the car pulled back up into the lot next to the station.

All eyes in the building seemed to be on the two of them as Barry lead Bart to the lab.

“Who’s this?” Singh asked, very confused at the sudden appearance of a small child behind Barry. He would know that Barry doesn’t have any family, especially not any this young.

“Um, this is my nephew, Bart,” Barry said, rubbing his neck at the awkwardness. “His grandmother is in the hospital, so she called me to pick him up for the week.”

“Huh. Didn’t know you had a nephew. Is she going to be all right?” Singh asked.

“Yeah, just a broken hip they think,” Bart filled in. Good thing too, since Barry had not actually known that.

“Ah,” Singh looked a bit concerned by the situation, but motioned for Barry to continue to his desk. “I sent you a couple more files, and I need the results for the blood testing in the Gonzales case by the end of the day.”

“You got it, boss,” Barry nodded and quickly herded Bart away before Singh remembered anything else he wanted Barry to do today.

“Okay,” Barry said quietly, “you can sit over here and do homework for a couple of hours,” he gestured to a chair in the corner behind his workstation.

“I’m on spring break.”

“Then play on your phone or listen to music or whatever,” Barry groaned back.

Bart raised an eyebrow at him but thankfully went and sat down without arguing.

_ Great job Barry _ , Barry thought.  _ ‘Go sit in the corner and don’t make any noise.’ Off to a great start on this whole uncle thing, aren’t you. I need to figure out how to relate to him. Can’t be that hard; I may not be a kid anymore, but I’m still hip with the youth. _

Barry went about his day, even finished entering and typing up the results for the Gonzales case in time to avoid Singh’s wrath, while Bart sat quietly on his phone. Barry still hadn’t come up with a plan for what to do about Bart, especially with his, hm, night job.

However, inspiration soon came in the form of his best friend and brilliant co-worker, Patty Spivot.

“Hey, Barry,” she greeted as she sidled up to him. “You finished with those blood analyses from the Flash tip yet?”

“Not quite, Patty,” Barry responded. But he couldn’t help noticing the way Bart’s head had whipped upward in his peripheral vision.  _ So you’re interested in the Flash? I can work with that. _ “Should be done soon, I’ll have them for you within the hour so you can finish your report.”

“Okay, thanks Barry!” she nodded and smiled as she headed back across the room to her station.

He waited a minute, then spoke.

“You know,” he said, looking over his shoulder, “I met the Flash one time.”

“Really?!” Bart blurted out, then immediately blushed and slapped a hand over his mouth.

“Don’t worry,” Barry smiled. “That’s pretty much exactly what I did, too.”

Bart started bouncing in his seat as Barry started to explain how the Flash had saved him and the entire precinct from a bomb one time, and how afterward the Flash had explained to him what had happened and how he had stopped the bomb in case they needed to study it or another one showed up.

“Oh my god, you got to help the Flash!” Bart squealed quietly, jumping up from his seat.

“I wouldn’t really say I helped him,” Barry shrugged. “I was just in the right place at the right time for him to pass on his message.”

“But you got to talk to him!” Bart gushed. “What was he like? What did he sound like? How tall was he? Did he talk really fast too? What did his suit look like up close? What-”

“Slow down just a bit there, I can only answer one question at a time!” Barry chuckled. “I didn’t talk to him long enough to really get an impression of his character, but he sounded kinda distorted, like he was speaking through some kind of synthesizer.”

_ Or vibrating his vocal cords to disguise his voice. Same difference, really, just different tools. _

“Um, what else. He didn’t talk that fast I guess, but he was brief, didn’t say much, just delivered the information.”

“I was doing research on the Flash for a current events project a couple of months ago, I read a whole bunch of posts on the GBC blog by Iris West, she says that she actually talked to him a couple of times about cases, just like he did with you, she says when he leaves he just kinda disappears in a big whoosh of air and leaves behind all kinds of static!”

Bart was walking back and forth along the wall of chemicals now, unable to contain his energy.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Barry nodded. “When he finished, he just whooshed right off.”

“Did you get to see his suit? Did he have a helmet? The old pictures of the Flash I found had a cool metal helmet, but Iris West described him wearing a red hood-like mask, made from the same material as the rest of his suit, not separate like a helmet.”

“Oh, yeah. Yeah, the Flash had a cowl on when I talked to him, not a helmet.”

“That’s probably more aerodynamic, but don’t you think it wouldn’t protect him as well as the helmet?” Bart asked, reaching to fiddle with the chain on the wall that opened the high windows. “Like, the helmet probably protected against concussions, and getting I heard a story about how he used it as a weapon sometimes, not sure how though, did he like throw it or something? Anyway, I-”

Bart’s excited babble suddenly broke off into a short-lived scream as there was a sudden bright flash and loud boom from above them.

Before Barry could react, Bart was on the floor in a puddle of . Barry was frozen. What had happened?

Then he realized.

The window had been struck by lightning. Bart had been touching the window chain. Bart had been struck by lightning.

In the exact. Same. Room. That Barry had been. Just six years earlier.

“Oh my god,” Barry whispered. “Oh my god!” he shouted, as he jolted forward to grab at Bart.

“I’m calling 911!” he heard someone yell behind him as he frantically searched for Bart’s pulse. When he found it, he was concerned by the uneven, too fast rhythm.

“They told me they grounded that!” Singh shouted, angry. “They promised it couldn’t happen again!”

Not again, was all Barry could think as he held his still nephew in his arms.


	5. Epilogue-Awakening

A full day after Bart was admitted, there had still been no change in his condition. The doctors weren’t able to even figure out why he hadn’t woken up yet, muchless figure out a way to help him.

Barry hadn’t left the hospital, only going down the hall to the bathroom and the vending machine. He couldn’t leave him. This was his nephew. He had only been responsible for him, only known about him, for a day, and already he had messed it up so horribly that Bart was unconscious in the hospital.

Then, something changed. The steady beep of the heart monitor kicked into overdrive, accelerating rapidly until to anyone who wasn’t able to slow down his perception of the outside world it would have sounded like a solid blare of sound. Then, the machine stopped being able to pick up the heartbeat, and started actually just letting out a single continuous beep.

He spent the first several seconds panicking internally, worrying that he was going to lose his nephew, but then he realized. He knew what was happening. He remembered it from when he woke up in the hospital himself, six years before.

“Oh. My. God.” Barry whispered, speeding himself up to match Bart’s current pace. “It really happened again.”

His first concern became getting Bart aware again so that the doctors wouldn’t try to resuscitate him or declare him dead. He reached out, and practically the moment his hands made contact with Bart’s shoulders the boy was upright and wide eyed, already babbling.

“OhgodI’mgoingtobelatetoschool!” He paused then, and looked around the room in confusion as he started vibrating in place. Then met Barry’s eyes, and seemed to remember what had happened. “Waitwhathappened, whyareweinthehospital, everythinghurtsdidIgethitbyacarorsomething, ohgodGrandmaisgoingtokillme-”

“Bart! I need you to slow down.”

When Bart’s only response was a confused silence and no change in heart rate, Barry decided he needed to try a different tactic.

“Okay, I need you to breathe with me, okay? We need to slow down your heartrate.” Barry said, gripping tighter onto Bart’s shoulders. “Breathe in, 2, 3, 4. Out, 2, 3, 4.”

They continued like that for what felt like two minutes, until Barry heard the distorted sound of the doctors rushing down the hall get too close to the door.

“Let me handle this, okay?” he whispered, squeezing Bart’s shoulders one more time before letting go to turn around and face the newcomers.

_ Oh no. _

“I need you to leave the room, sir, I- _ you _ ,” the doctor hissed, somehow immediately recognizing him as her escaped former coma patient. “You didn’t even come to your follow-up.”

“Um,” he said, shifting nervously away from where her grip on her tablet was starting to feel threatening. “I forgot? And anyway, I survived, so, it’s all good!”

“My colleague saw you walk through the wrong door. Twice. Before you even made it off the floor.”

“Um, heh, I don’t actually remember that.” Her eye twitched alarmingly, so he decided he needed to redirect her attention before she tried to strap him down to a bed for that follow-up appointment. “This is my nephew! He have the same condition I do, where it’s hard to measure our pulses, but he seems fine now, so we’ll just be going.”

“What.” She seemed to only then notice that despite the continued blaring of the heart monitor, the patient was sitting upright in the bed, following the conversation back and forth between the two of them. Her free hand still inched toward the crash cart and crew behind her.

“Yeah, see? He’s fine. I’m sure his grandmother is very worried, so we should probably be getting home.”

“What is this about a medical condition?” she eyed him suspiciously, clearly unwilling to just let him go with no explanation.

“Ah, yeah, my medical condition,” he said, waving his arm around to show off his fancy, shiny ‘medical’ bracelet. “It’s called cardio dubius, it means there’s something about, like, my pulse or veins or something that makes it hard to measure my heart beat.”

“I’ve never heard of that,” she frowned.

_ Oh god _ , Barry sweated.  _ If my secret identity gets found out by a bitter doctor, Batman is going to kill me in my sleep. _

“Yeah,” he lied through his teeth. “It’s not well-known, less than a hundred documented cases, actually.”

“Hm,” she scowled at him. However, she must have wanted to deal with him even less than he wanted to deal with her, because after another minute of intense scrutiny she just gave him instructions on how to take care of Bart’s injuries and hustled him out of the hospital.

Speaking of whom, his nephew had been practically vibrating out of his skin with questions the entire time, but had managed to restrain himself until they got to the car.

“Whatisgoingon, whyiseverythingmovingsoooslooow, it’slikeeveryoneelseisinslowmotion, exceptnotyou, whynotyoutoo, howdidyouknowwhatwasgoingon, canyouteachmetoslowdown, I’mgoingtoneedthatatschoolnextweek, ohgodschool, it’sgoingtosuckevenmorethanusualwiththis, isthistemporary, didIreallygetstruckbylightning-”

“Slow down kid,” Barry sighed, turning the keys in the ignition. “We’re going to need to take this one step at a time.”


End file.
